


In Which Professional Courtesy is Extended

by DesdemonaKaylose



Category: Hanna Is Not A Boy's Name, Supernatural
Genre: Gen, I believe this could be the beginning of a beautiful friendship
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2013-02-24
Updated: 2013-02-24
Packaged: 2017-12-03 10:26:59
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,731
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/697267
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/DesdemonaKaylose/pseuds/DesdemonaKaylose
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Really, these guys don't seem so bad. They just got off on the wrong foot. Hanna has made friends in tighter spots than this one--he has a knack for it.</p>
            </blockquote>





	In Which Professional Courtesy is Extended

Starting with a three foot machete to the throat isn’t usually a good way to begin a friendship, but Hanna had never let a little thing like that stop him.

At his back, Agamemnon shifted like a particularly cautious tree, resting his gloved fingers on Hanna’s shoulders in a silent warning. He did not approve of Hanna endangering himself on his behalf, but then, that was another thing that had never stopped Hanna!

“Whoa,” Hanna said, unshifting even when a steel tooth bit into the underside of his jaw. “Hey now, if you’ve got a problem with Corintheus I’m sure it’s nothing we can’t talk out, okay?”

The man in possession of the machete—who was built, by the way, like whoa freaking Greek sculpture, the man could have walked right out of a museum—paused, or at least he paused more than he had already been pausing. Considering that he hadn’t actually decapitated anyone yet, so he must have been pausing a little bit already. But now he drew back, maybe a millimeter, and frowned deeply. The lines on his face gave way like they’d been carved in over a long and difficult lifetime, even though he couldn’t have been more than 35, tops.

“Corintheus?” he echoed, flicking his attention up at the zombie, who was about his eye level anyways.

“My partner!” Hanna elaborated, smiling widely. “You’ll never meet a better detective! And he plays a mean game of poker too—how much did you win off Casmiro last week?”

“I believe it was something like 413 dollars,” the dead man answered, smoothly. “He isn’t as good as he thinks he is.”

“Well you’d think with god knows how many centuries under his belt—”

“Whoa whoa whoa,” the second stranger cut in, the one who had been standing behind Godzilla with his berretta trained on Prometheus’ forehead. “You’re a detective? This… thing is your partner?”

Hanna frowned a little. “There’s no need to be xenophobic about it. Paris is a zombie, or, I mean, he’s dead and all so that makes him a zombie as far as we can tell.”

“I don’t eat,” he added, and Hanna thought he detected a hint of amusement in the otherwise deadpan delivery. “At all. I’m sure you were wondering.”

The two men exchanged glances. You got the feeling that they could say a lot like that, and it probably came in handy for keeping guys like Hanna out of the loop. Major buzz kill on the olive branch front.

“So, uh, yeah!” the magician started, fixing a bright look on the shadowy, shorter one. “I’m Hanna Falk Cross, paranormal investigator! What’s your name?”

“…Dean,” the man replied, scrutiny unrelenting. “If he doesn’t eat, how does he function?”

“Dunno,” Hanna answered. “Magic I guess?”

“You don’t know?” the huge one asked, drawing back his blade another fraction of an inch. “Didn’t you raise him?”

“Not me!” Hanna shrugged, taking the movement as a good sign. “I wouldn't know how. We hooked up a while ago, but he’s been around for a long time.”

“How long?”

“At least a decade,” Hector supplied.

The knife-wielding one looked back over his shoulder. 

“Better safe than sorry,” Dean noted, although whatever that meant, it didn’t sound like his heart was really in it. “I dunno, man, every time we go down this road it’s like we end up with our asses kicked no matter what we do. I’m talking like that case in San Francisco kind of kicked.”

Hanna bounced, once, so his sneakers hit the ground with an excited whump. “Case!” he repeated, “Are you detectives too?”

They both frowned for a moment.

“Yeah,” Dean said, finally, “I guess. Paranormal investigators. Sure. Regular Mulder and Scully up in here.” 

“Awesome! We’re here about the ghoul, are you here about the ghoul? Oh man we could totally collaborate, like two heads are better than one do you work on commission will I mess you up? I’m doing this one pro-bono—okay I do like most of my stuff pro-bono but sometimes people buy me dinner or give me gift cards—”

The big one shook his longish hair and dropped the machete. “Uh, Hanna, was that it?”

Hanna nodded. 

“Okay, Hanna, do you even know what a ghoul is?”

“Of course,” Hanna replied, a little indignant. “I do my research. The thing about ghouls is that they’re pretty closely related to other supernatural scavengers so I think I’ve got a background considering a few weeks ago me and Amphytrion had a pretty heavy run in with a—”

“Okay, okay,” Dean cut in. “Come on, I think the worst that kid’s gonna do is motor-mouth us to death.”

It was hard to be sure, but it looked like the one with the machete was a little relieved to re-sheath it. When he stepped away, it was with the quick, purposeful motions of someone who had elsewhere to be and little time to be there in.

“Wait, gentlemen,” the zombie started, pulling Hanna back toward himself, “you _are_ here about the ghoul, aren’t you?”

Dean looked a little helpless when it came to chatting with corpses, so his partner answered for them: “Yeah, that’s us too.”

“Then,” the zombie went on, “might I suggest we pool our efforts? As long as you mean us no harm, it seems to me that stumbling over each other’s toes for the rest of the night won’t get either of us very far.”

The men shared another uneasy look.

“I don’t want to be mean,” the big one said, “but honestly? You’d probably just slow us down.”

“Unless you can bring something killer to the table,” Dean snorted, “like ghoul radar.”

Hanna bit his lip for a moment and then grinned. He snatched his marker out of his pocket and uncapped it in one quick motion. “Watch this,” he said.

Four parallel lines and a pentagon—it wasn’t from his usual family of runes, but there was no knocking eastern branches when you could get your hands on the manuals—slid easily across the skin on the back of his hand, and blue light sprayed up off the lines like a thin mist before he could even recap the marker.

“One ghoul radar!” he announced, regarding the shape with a little pride. Took him ages to get that one right. “Technically it’s not a ghoul radar _specifically_ , but I can tune it—”

He stopped, finally noticing the aggressive wariness that had sprung up in his new acquaintances’ postures. A hand was back on the handle of the machete.

“…Problem?”

“You didn’t mention you were a witch,” Dean growled—actually growled, wow, okay, that was a teensy bit unnerving.

“I’m… not?” Hanna tried, rubbing a little self-consciously at the still-glowing rune. “I mean like, I don’t identify as witch? I think rune-mage is the technical term, or yanno, sometimes I go with magician because it sounds neat and classy? It’s not like I have superpowers or anything. You could learn it too, if you had the time and, uh, necessity. I guess.”

Neither of the men said anything.

“Does it,” Hanna said, “make you uncomfortable or something? Because it’s really handy and I’m, wow, a lot better with it than with weaponry, but I can… put it away, if you need me to?”

The one with the machete opened his mouth to say something, but his friend cut him off.

“You can come with,” he said, decisively, as if he’d spent hours puzzling over a particularly difficult math problem and finally decided to put down his wrong answer and be done with it. It sounded like Hanna’s experience with high school, what little he remembered of that.

“Dean, you can’t be serious.”

“Go ahead and take a look around, would you?”

“Dean.”

“Sam,” the man said, raising an eyebrow, “just go?”

Sam—apparently—threw his hands up and started off down the hall, cursing vaguely as his foot skirted a puddle of brackish goo. When the sibilants had quieted down to a whisper at the end of the corridor, Dean turned back to Hanna and sighed.

“Kid,” Dean said, with a sideways sort of grin that clearly wasn’t a grin at all, except in the minor detail that its physical shape resembled one. “A word of advice? You’re too young to be hunting. Go back to school, meet some girls, get like… a couple years of doing what everybody else does. You don’t have to do this just because you can. You’re what, like fifteen?”

Hanna’s face crumpled like a particularly displeased raisin. “I’m twenty-four,” he replied, bristling.

Dean puffed out his cheeks and squinted for a second. “What,” he said, “really?”

“Yeeeah.”

“Oh. Damn. How long you been in the life?”

Hanna bounced on the balls of his feet. “Uuuuh, like… five years I think?”

Dean frowned. “Raised in it?”

“Huh?”

“Okay, Hanna, here’s the thing,” Dean told him, shoving his hands in his pockets. “There’s two kinds of hunters—you got the kids born into it, and the guys who get a nasty brush with the back side of the closet later in life. Those guys don’t tend to last as long. Which one are you?”

“Oh,” Hanna replied uneasily. That was edging into territory he did not particularly care to talk about! Especially with Orestes around. “I learned magic from this homeless guy? He worked for liquor but he was really good, like, the Obi Wan to my Luke and all. He lived in a box. Nice box. Better than mine!”

Menelaus looked at him oddly, traffic light eyes flashing as his head tilted slightly, and Hanna bit his cheek. Whoops.

Dean gave him this oddly stoic look of his own, and Hanna had the vague sense that he was being offered a knowing bro-manly handshake on some psychic level available only rough and tumble road-weary rogues. Obviously Hanna was having some difficulty accessing that plane of enlightenment.

“So, uh,” Hanna said, quickly, “how about that ghoul then, you should definitely fill us in on what you know because I’ve got a load of research but there’s nothing for it like field experience am I right!”

Dean looked at him for a second long, and then turned heel and started down the hallway after his partner. “Yeah,” he answered, “we can talk shop on the way. Sam’s probably found something by now.”


End file.
